


Santa Carla Twilight

by Blake



Category: AFI (Band)
Genre: 2013, Cheating, Horrible People, Internalized Homophobia, Jade's marriage, M/M, Santa Cruz beach boardwalk, Technophobia, Vegan jokes, and these are facts, apocalypse feels, except Davey might not be a dude but, fatphobia, judgmental attitudes, old fucks, straight edge assholes, that's another story, they're just two rich gen x dudes, vampire-coded characters, who struggle with internalized homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-31
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:01:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28447320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake
Summary: [Repost]Too hot in LA, and they were both going stir crazy. The Bay was off-limits, and Davey suffered a whim to ride the Giant Dipper.
Relationships: Davey Havok/Jade Puget
Comments: 2





	Santa Carla Twilight

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, so this is an experiment. I have a lot of old AFI stories that I've been thinking about re-posting because I feel differently about them than I did when I took them down. I kind of just want to see how this feels. I literally hate them so much but I also feel bad for people who struggle with internalize homophobia and love engaging with complex identity issues and mental health and stuff so! Here we are.

“Can we not sit around like old men?” He doesn’t take his eyes off the horizon as he says it. They’re too dry, and blinking will sting. His eyes are the sea’s. “We might as well start up a chess match.”

His sunglasses are snatched from his face. His eyes flinch closed. It doesn’t sting as much as he anticipated. “Jade. What.” He doesn’t hide his annoyance. Jade doesn’t either, twirling Davey’s glasses in the air between their faces, smirking like he’s amused and disappointed at the same time. Davey doesn’t even know what he did wrong. But he doesn’t know what Jade did either. He blows a harsh stream of air into the careful wing of Jade’s hair, just because.

Jade must have been waiting, getting ready while Davey stared off into the bay, because out of nowhere, his hand slaps onto Davey’s face with a cold blob of what smells like second grade swim camp. Sunscreen. Davey lets it happen, enjoying the cool relief from the midday sun. “You can’t talk about being old around me,” Jade murmurs, his thumb pushing Davey’s face into undignified shapes. His lips twisted apart, Davey inhales the stale breath of Jade’s words. “It’s insensitive. It’s like, stubbing your toe in front of an amputee.”

Davey lets his head fall forward into the cradle of Jade’s palm rubbing sunscreen across his temples. “Oh infinitely older and wiser elder of mine, will you join my youthful body in a youthful spree around the boardwalk?” It’s the most effort he’s put into making words since the night before. He never has to put effort into talking to Jade, not because they communicate perfectly, not anymore, but because when they aren’t communicating perfectly, the prospect of failure wears them both out so much that they give up, apologetic, resentful, exhausted, waiting. Six hours in a car with music, an hour at a restaurant with fresh-pressed juice, another wandering around downtown Santa Cruz in a sleep-deprived fog in search of direction, and Davey feels energized, rejuvenated by the effort of speaking.

Pinprick sensations like needles into his skull make tears form and start to drip. With a flick of his wrist, he pushes Jade’s hands off his face, and grimaces at him through a pained squint. “It’s in my eyes, it’s in my eyes,” he sings, wiping at the tears even though it only spreads the sunscreen further.

Jade is smiling at him, because he’s heard that joke so many times before.

Two sick, perverted creatures, they stroll side by side down the boardwalk, under the tracks of rides that occasionally shake when someone drifts in to ride them. He and Jade, they are a crime against nature. Too old to be the teenagers that they are. They are here because they are this unique crime against nature. Too hot in LA, and they were both going stir crazy. The Bay was off-limits, and Davey suffered a whim to ride the Giant Dipper.

Instead of realizing the impracticality of their plan, instead of coming to the conclusion that they felt like it but couldn’t, they did it. Nothing stopped them. They were cutting classes to go ride roller coasters, but they had no classes to cut. What he used to believe was his personality, his values, he now knew was just a disease called privilege. Such privilege is such an aberration. Davey feels it deep, but can’t fix it any more than he can make the ocean recede. At least, Jade is the same creature.

Irresponsible as teenagers, but without responsibilities to drop, what was their rebellion as they got in the car without packing, drove recklessly through the dawn to a place where hippies surf to old age in the sun and vampires stay forever young in celluloid?

“Remember the time you tricked me into coming here?” Jade asks as the log flume sloshes quietly nearby.

Davey doesn’t remember such a thing. He’s watching a huge, casserole-raised tourist rubbing sunscreen into his huge, casserole-raised wife’s white shoulder. They look giddy. He wonders what jobs they’re taking a vacation from. “What?”

“You talked me into skipping lecture to drive down and visit Adam.”

“Oh yeah,” Davey says, smiling at the memory. “And you totally had a subconscious crush on me so you fell for it.”

“I remember the feeling of, like, seeing Adam turn us away because he had classes to get to, and thinking like shit, I have classes to get to, but instead I’m in fucking Santa Cruz getting dragged to the Haunted Castle.”

“What can I say? I was a charming eighteen.”

“You had two shirts, Dave. Two.”

“And you had college weight and drank beer.”

They walk past the empty children’s coaster, hear screams from the log flume above it. Their shoulders jostle against one another with every step, and it feels comfortable like polar fleece in winter. “Good thing we waited to fall in love,” Jade comments quietly.

Retracing their steps entirely, they make it all the way back to the Haunted Castle. They pass kids in strollers painting their faces with candy, grinning and panting nine-year-olds racing each other from the exit of the Giant Dipper to the entrance of the same ride, tweens in shorts that are too short and flip-flops that are too loud, raisiny hippies talking to themselves, and what must be the entire population of Milwaukee.  
When they arrive, Davey squints to look up at the huge, looming black spider announcing the ride’s name. He eyes it suspiciously. “This is not my Haunted Castle,” he declares.

“Yeah, they changed it,” Jade tells him absently. He’s reading the sign, counting out half of the tickets they’d bought. Briefly, so briefly, Davey thinks _he knows that because he’s been here more recently than I have, been here without me, been here with someone else_ , but he manages to let the thought go. He keeps having vague images drift into his mind, of the note he knows Jade left for her, that said when he’d be back but not where he was going, because she is the only responsibility Jade has to drop. Distantly, Davey feels both sad and victorious that the only thing marriage did was cement their mysteriousness in the tried and true mold of adultery. Lovers aspire to learn everything about one another; husbands and wives know exactly as much as they will ever know. Davey imagines a ghost of her face, disappointed, not surprised, getting what she asked for, and he lets it go.

The ride is so different from what Davey remembers, and the people in the car in front of them film the whole ride on their phone, but he doesn’t even register his anger, only a far away sense of loss. They stumble out the other side together, blinded by the bleached-blue sunlight and chuckling at the absurdity of the sunlit world.

“Nobody should be allowed to wear those dresses but Christina Ricci,” Davey says, probably too loud.

Jade walks two inches behind him and joins him in glaring at the young people wearing three variations of lightweight, thigh-length black sundresses with tiny floral print. “Maybe Alicia Silverstone.”

They walk down to the end of the boardwalk, talking about how it’s too early for nineties retro, how quickly the world is spinning out of control. Bruce Springsteen plays from the speakers. Next, Katy Perry. Jade buys a big bag of taffy and chews a bright green one. Davey wonders if he brings her souvenirs from trips she never hears about.

The bones trapped in Davey’s legs start to ache with every step. He and Jade sit back down on the bench they started at, just for a while. The world is busier now that schools have let out for the day. It makes them both weary to watch.

“Every single one of them,” Jade murmurs.

“This can’t be reality,” Davey agrees. Every beach towel laid out on the sand before them is accompanied by at least one glowing phone screen. Families, groups of friends, lying together in the sand, typing on touch-screens instead of talking to one another.

“Reality is science fiction, didn’t you get the memo?” Jade is playing with his hair again. Jade’s bad habits are even more magnetic to Davey’s gaze than the horrors of the modern world.

“Do people even know what memos are anymore?”

Jade points in particular to a middle-aged man holding up his iPad at an angle to block out the sun and its reflection on the water, though he keeps having to adjust his position because his toddler keeps climbing up his back and shoulders in vain attempts to grab the iPad herself.

“Remember that paperback Decadent poetry collection I had?”

“The one that you brought to the beach with you because you were a pretentious little shit?”

“Only on the sly,” Davey protests. “It was pocket sized.”

Jade stops playing with his hair, starts brushing his fingertips against Davey’s hairline. Davey knows he’s studying the greys, and feels known. “I know. My hands were down your pockets a lot back then.”

Davey remembers desperate kisses. The kind that felt like being devoured, being craved. He remembers Jade’s hands shaking on his face because he had to hold back just to keep from injuring him. He remembers the taste of Jade’s breath, somehow different then. It felt like magic. He remembers desperate kisses.

“That was the time we made out on the Haunted Castle, huh?”

Jade shrugs, defensive against something Davey isn’t even implying, but definitely has implied. “You liked the secrecy too.”

He drops his hand from Davey’s face, lays it on the bench beside Davey’s hand. Davey looks down at their hands, lying side by side like bodies in a shared grave. Weathered skin, manicured nails, a shared crime against nature. He studies the lined length of Jade’s fingers, tries to imagine how many times all four of them have been inside Davey’s body, tries to imagine how magic, how sensation, happens. With a small spark of sickness in his diaphragm, he realizes he’s glad that it’s not Jade’s left hand that’s lying beside his.

Jade asks how long he thinks they have before the Boardwalk is under water, and moves his hand two inches to cover Davey’s. Of its own accord, Davey’s hand turns upward, unfurls like an anemone to take in Jade’s palm and swallow it.

In slow motion, feeling like he does when he’s dizzy and gravity makes decisions for him, Davey rests his head quietly on Jade’s shoulder. Jade lets it happen, so Davey hitches his legs up onto the bench beside him to lean diagonally on him. He opens his eyes. Jade drops his own head onto Davey’s.

Sometimes, Davey fears that he might be paranoid, because he walks around half-expecting people to become alerted to their presence by some universal signal, and they’ll all turn their heads in unison and stare at the two of them because they don’t belong. It will show up on their phone screens in subliminal messaging, _Look behind you, there are intruders! Assimilate them!_ , and they will stare at him with electronic glow on their faces.

But nobody turns to look at them, not even in their glaring difference from the rest of the crowd. Their expensive clothes, their fairly evident queerness, their lack of phones, their touch, it all goes unnoticed. Somehow that makes him even sadder.

“You know climate change isn’t going to be gradual like they keep telling us,” Davey says mournfully.

“Probably not,” Jade agrees.

They talk about extreme weather, wildfires, drought, plankton, bees, a California without agriculture, earthquakes, California under the Pacific: the end of the only world they care about, aberrant self-absorbed teenagers as they are.

There’s a pause in their conversation, so Davey sighs, says, “You know what’s causing climate change?”

Jade shifts in his seat, moving pressure off his tailbone. Davey thinks about putting his hand under Jade’s ass, which he once called _mine_ , which he knows the shape of too well. “What?”

Davey turns his head, resting his chin on Jade’s shoulder and staring into Jade’s already-amused face. “People who eat cheese.”

Jade kisses his lips so quickly and softly, Davey barely tastes the cherry flavor of his most recent taffy.

They’re on their feet walking hand in hand through the sand before Davey even thinks to respond. Letting it go, he reaches out and brushes sand off the ass of Jade’s teenage-girl jeans.

“You know like, if a dude has a girl’s name tattooed on his arm, can you tell the difference between if it’s a girlfriend or a family member?”

Davey looks over at the person who inspired Jade to ask. There’s a name in large script on his arm, and Davey can’t tell.

“No,” he says. He realizes that even if there are multiple names, he can’t tell. It could be a list of children, but it could also be a list of exes. Each one important enough to tattoo, in the moment. Each one replaced. He sees what must be an eighteen-year-old girl with a boy’s name in flowery script on her wrist. There are tattoos everywhere. College students with ankle tattoos, hipsters with geometrical pieces small enough to cover up for work, middle aged people with butterflies. They walk past a man with three grey Xs on his calf who’s smoking a cigarette. Davey thinks of all the thought, all the shame he’s wasted on his own body and its embarrassment of variations on the theme of Jade. What does it even mean that he can connect most of his tattoos to the same person, if everyone else lets go of theirs? Apparently ink is no longer a permanent medium. He got a statue done in marble, only to notice that everyone else’s statues were washing away like sand castles.

“I hate you so much, but you’re still my favorite person,” Davey says. He rests his head on Jade’s shoulder, which presses his sunglasses painfully into his face but it doesn’t matter.

Even as crimes against nature, they pass by invisible. Davey wishes for a time when they could long to be invisible, when he used to believe, _we could go on forever, perfect, if only we could be invisible_.

“I have a confession,” Jade says, startling Davey out of his thoughts. Without pausing, he finishes, “I had a sex dream about you in the car.”

That makes sense, Davey thinks. Jade is soft and malleable sometimes, and cold steel other times, and usually there’s some measurable reason for whichever way he is. “You still have sex dreams about me? Aw, I’m honored,” Davey jokes.

“Yeah, I still dream about choking on you.”

“Choking on my cock?” Davey pushes, smirking.

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“Choking on your cock,” Jade says without a fight, without even blushing. “And your hair was all grey.”

That silences Davey for a moment. He always assumed that if he appeared in Jade’s dreams in that way, that it was a younger, more loved and more beautiful version of himself. Tears burn behind his eyes.

“We’re here,” Jade says, stopping in his tracks and pulling Davey out of foot-traffic’s way. Davey looks around and realizes that they’re at the entrance to the Giant Dipper, the ride that inspired their trip to Santa Cruz in the first place.

He cranes his neck to see the shaking white tracks, their chipping red trim tinged gold by the falling sun. Children scream. He imagines the sensation of freefalling. He remembers the Haunted Castle. “What if it’s different?” he asks.

“It’s not.”

Davey drops his gaze from the sun and finds Jade’s smell, his face so nearby. “I’m not ready,” Davey informs him.

They head toward the kid rides again. Jade says, “So we caused global warming and drove your car all the way up here for nothing?” He sounds absolutely fine with that.

“When do you want to head back?” Davey asks, not pressing, not anxious, just curious.

He feels Jade shrug because it’s against his shoulder. Jade’s teeth are crooked, hanging between his breath-parted lips. Davey wonders how many times he has brushed his thumbs up the slope of Jade’s nose. It must have been thousands. He could reconstruct the cartilage frame of it with clay and memory.

They come back around to the Giant Dipper, but it’s closed. It’s the off-season, so the rides shut off at five. Davey stands underneath the quiet track and looks up at the sun, not that low in the sky but hazy and orange like the end of the day. He judges that it could be five.

Jade’s mouth presses to his lower lip. Davey lowers his face from its upturned position, and the kiss burns bright for a moment, Jade leaning into him and biting down and his jaw shakes under Davey’s palm, and then it fades out. They both pull away.

Numbness spreads through his chest. He studies the piercing scars along the ridge of Jade’s ear. He rubs his thumb over them. “What do you do things like that for?” he asks. He feels sad. If he could bottle up sadness, free of sorrow or regret or guilt or anger fatigue or fear, he would bottle up this.

They stand on the cooling sand of the beach for a while. They know it’s cooling because they take off their shoes, leave them next to someone’s sandals. They walk toward the water and the sand gets colder. The horizon is an ominous blur of blue-grey ocean and blue-grey sky with no sun to mark the line because the beach faces south. Davey feels drawn to the water, but he’s picking up body-energy from Jade that suggests Jade is even more drawn to it. He doesn’t know who starts stripping first, but soon, they’re the only two fools walking into the frigid water. Midwestern tourists may have not taken an interest in them all day, but Davey knows that this, at least, is drawing attention.

“Fuck, it’s cold,” Davey gasps. They’re knee deep and it already feels like there are knives in his chest. He’s gotten too used to heated, rich-kid swimming pools. Jade strides ahead of him, so he braces himself and catches up.

“Wrote a new straight edge song. Just now, in my head,” Jade says, speaking quickly enough to combat the cold. Davey gets side-swiped by a wave. He loses a couple of steps while Jade says, “It goes, ‘vampires suck blood, but you suck crud.’”

“Wow,” Davey offers, focused mostly on dodging waves that threaten to catch his underwear. But he spares a smile.

“This is why I have guitars.” Jade turns his head to yell it over his shoulder. He looks so young against the ancient blue-grey sea-sky, their future.

Davey knows it gives him away every time, but he grins because he can’t help it. Jade takes a nervous stance and backs away, but not fast enough, because Davey launches forward and takes them both into the water.

Laughing, they surface. A wave takes Davey from behind. When he can see again, Jade is pushing him out of the water only to throw him back down with a splash. Davey sucks in water and tastes salt, which tastes like Jade’s tears and running snot. He recovers his footing. Suddenly feeling annoyed for no good reason, he grabs hold of both Jade’s forearms and tries to wrestle his slippery body down under the water. But Jade is taller than him, and is standing on the higher end of the sandy slant. Structurally, it’s a challenge.

Jade is still laughing occasionally, but there’s annoyance in the set of his forehead, too, as he tries to jerk out of Davey’s grasp. Davey’s feet slip through the sand because suddenly, Jade collapses under him but simultaneously twists so Davey’s back is the one that ends up hitting the water. As the water fills in over his face, Davey has the thought that he wishes he didn’t have to see the poetry in fucking everything. It’s a useless, stupid, cruel curse.

He comes up blinded by his own hair, which is plastered straight down his forehead. Jade pushes it away before Davey has the chance, like he was right there, waiting. Then he shoulders Davey into motion, pushing off and propelling Davey backward with their chests somewhat near. Davey feels like an otter. Jade is his abalone.

There are rip currents and tides and rogue waves to be wary of here. Davey looks to the shore for their dark pile of designer clothing. It’s far away, as are the Midwestern tourists who can’t see them out here. He’s starting to get cold again, but Jade isn’t turning around, so there can’t be anything to worry about.

He tests for sand beneath them, finds just enough to push off of, and presses into Jade. Their skin slides so easily together, they’re like tectonic plates with a hungry fault. Davey rubs his legs, his body up into Jade’s. The motion makes his head drop beneath the surface, but Jade follows, and they kiss. It tastes like snot and tears and dead fish and plastic and the end, and this is everything Davey wants, right here.


End file.
